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Monday, May 5, 2014

We, Monsters Blog Tour

Welcome to day one of the We, Monsters blog tour. This tour was organized by Melanie over at Grab The Lapels ( you should totally check them out. They focus on reviewing books written by female authors.), and we're thrilled to kick it all off!

In the novel We, Monsters (2014, Numina Press) by
Zarina Zabrisky, clinical psychologist Dr. Michael H. Strong receives a
manuscript from a woman he’s never met. She calls herself Mistress Rose, and
she wants him to publish the notes of her life and experiences as a dominatrix.
Dr. Strong feels certain that Mistress Rose is no longer alive, but he is
intrigued by her story and analyzes its contents. Dive into a world of sex,
psychology, reality undone, and a past so mysterious you may not believe it...

He was comfortably slumped in
his favorite place: the sunken green armchair in the living room, an open
bottle of beer in one hand, the remote in the other, the Economist on his lap,
and a football game on. I sat on the carpet by his knee. Our cat Potemkin, a
miniature female tabby with delusions of grandeur and a short stub for a tail,
settled by his other knee and pretended to doze off.

“Good game,” I said. “Honey?”

“Mhm…”

“Honey, I’m working on a new
book.”

“Sure.”

“You want to hear what the book
is about?”

“Sure.”

“It’s—it’s about sex workers.”

“Sure.”

“Did you hear me?”

“Sure. Your book… I’m
listening…”

I stood up and screamed into
his ear, “Sex!”

That got his attention. Both
Potemkin and Luke stared at me. Luke’s round, water-grey eyes and fluffy,
pinkish eyelashes hadn’t changed throughout our fifteen years together, and
although he’d lost most of his dull orange curls, he, as always, reminded me of
a little boy—over six feet tall—about to go on a roller-coaster ride, curious
and frightened at the same time.

“What?” he said.

“Honey, I am writing a book
about sex workers.”

“Who?”

“God! Prostitutes. About
prostitutes…” I said. “A book.”

“Okay. Weird. And?”

I wanted to tell Luke that I
had spent the whole winter in a freezing library trying to capture that last
chapter, that I’d developed carpal-tunnel pain browsing the Web, that the facts
I had learned about escorts were the most useless facts ever—for instance, I
had discovered that clients often threw cheesecakes at working girls—that I had
to write this novel, that I’d been having nightmares every night, and so much
more. Instead, I said: “Ehh… It’s kind of hard to explain, but basically I need
to do some research. I mean… hands-on research.”

“What, you want to be a
hooker?”

“No, Honey. Just a temporary
job, a dominatrix. At a dungeon. Bondage, spanking, that kind of stuff. No
actual sex…”

My husband drank some beer and
then looked at the bottle as if the answer was spelled out on its green label.
Then he looked up at me. Potemkin was looking at me, too. Together they made a
tough jury.

“Why, again, are you doing it?”

I should have told him: “Because
of my past.”

Like a maniac with a razor, the
past kept chasing me. It raged in my nightmares and in my daydreams. I would
get up, have my oatmeal, and move on. But ignoring the past is ignoring a
bomb—no, a nuclear reactor. Ignore it and it might explode.

I could never have told Luke
any of that; I didn’t know it myself.

Instead, I said, “I told
you…material for my book. Why, are you prejudiced?”

Beyond anything, Luke, the
former captain of the Tufts football team, valued freedom, justice, and independence.
We had assigned shifts for changing diapers and taking garbage out. I was free
to go out on Saturday with the neighbors for a girls’ night out—if I gave him a
week’s notice.

Luke stared at his bottle
again. I picked a sliver of a cheese cracker from the bluish carpet; the house
needed vacuuming. Potemkin scratched behind her ear with her hind paw for what
seemed like an eternity. Finally, Luke cleared his throat.

“How about you write about
parenting? Lisa just got her book published, you know. Or children’s stories,
you know, like the stories you tell Nick—about a little crocodile—”

“Armadillo.”

“Sure. Those are good. I mean,
why hookers?”

“Don’t call them that.”

I stood up and walked to the
window. The street looked empty at first, but then I saw Vanessa, our neighbor,
in her eggplant kimono, dragging an oversized green recycling bin out into the
street. I forgot it was garbage night. I sighed.

“Like, can I be? Really?
But—What am I going to do, divorce you?” He sighed, too. “You’re a grownup, a
free person in a free country. Can I watch my game now? And would you mind
bringing me another beer?”(1)

I got him a beer from the
fridge and started to take empty beer bottles and Diet Coke cans out from the
kitchen. It was my garbage shift.

(1) From clinical psychologist Dr. Michael H. Strong: Luke’s reaction demonstrates the unvoiced conflicts in this marriage. He is in denial or rationalizing; it is possible he has been unfaithful and his guilt is now absolved in the unconscious by his understanding attitude towards his wife’s research. He also “buys” himself more freedom in the future—Rose’s transgression will justify his own inappropriate or questionable actions and behaviors. Couples often enter into unspoken agreements of this sort; for example, “I will close my eyes to your infidelities, and you will forgive my shopping addiction.”

Zarina
Zabrisky is the author of short story collections IRON (2012, Epic Rites Press), A
CUTE TOMBSTONE (2013, Epic Rites Press), a novel We, Monsters (2014, Numina Press), and a book of poetry co-authored
with Simon Rogghe (forthcoming in 2014 from Numina Press). Zabrisky started to
write at six. She earned her MFA from St. Petersburg University, Russia, and
wrote while traveling around the world as a street artist, translator, and a
kickboxing instructor. Her work appeared in over thirty literary magazines and
anthologies in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Hong Kong, and Nepal. A three-time
Pushcart Prize nominee and a recipient of 2013 Acker Award for Achievement in
The Avant Garde, Zabrisky is also known for her experimental Word and Music
Fusion performances.

Tomorrow, hit up The Book Cove to follow the tour and read about Zarina's concerns regarding women and publishing, what defines "erotica," and why it's so important to her that she transcend being known as a "woman writer"

5 comments:

Congratulations Zarina ! I enjoyed the book very much, and as you know I wrote about it here http://open.salon.com/blog/poethead/2014/01/28/we_monsters_by_zarina_zabrisky

I hope to see some discussion on the unreliability of the writer of the footnote, and their importance to the development of your theme. They allow your protagonist to rationalise her actions, but Mistress Rose does not require much encouragement to begin this life, she is constantly both drawn to and repulsed by what she is experiencing. Its a fascinating book.

Chris, thank you for reading my novel, for your review and a thought-provoking comment. I will cover some of the footnotes related comments in one of my interviews of this blog tour. You, see, I grew up on Russian classical novels, and in original they almost always have footnotes as the Russian nobility spoke and wrote in French. So, the top of the page was in French; the translation was in footnotes. I am used to a page divided in two. In my novel it became as much as a plot driving tool as a visual, non-verbal way of expressing the main themes of double life and a split internal world, for both protagonist. I love Bakhtin's definition of a polyphonic novel; he notes that in Dostoevsky's novels each character is a point of view. As for the unreliable narrator, Nabokov's "Lolita" and "Pale Fire" always fascinated me. Whom to trust? Or, to trust or not to trust? I trust my reader to make choices. ;) Thank you for an excellent question!

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